Food safety frequently comes up in the regulation/no regulation debate. Supposedly we need regulation to keep our food safe. However, regulation often fails us anyways; recently, salmonella peanuts killed 9 and sickened 22,500 others, and 143 million tons of beef from sick cows was recalled. So what’s a regulator to do?

Maybe we should take a lesson from the 1980’s commercials for the Hair Club for Men. You may remember those cheesy ads, which concluded with the pitchman declaring that “I’m not only the Hair Club president, I’m also a client.” The right way to align the incentives of management with those of the customers, in other words, may be to make sure that the managers are customers. One way we could implement this would be to require inspectors to certify that they saw the president of the company (or perhaps the plant manager) eating a substantial helping of the product being sold. (Maybe the inspectors should be required to eat some as well!) Someone who knows that his downer-burger was made from a cow that was too sick to stand, or his salmonella-butter-and-jelly sandwich contained infested nuts, might not be so happy about his working lunch.

I think this is what people mean when they talk about smarter regulation. I, for one, am a fan.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.